Project's techno revolution has been 'Tried' before

By Peter Smith

It's 1999. Shouldn't techno and hip-hop know what to make of each other? Timbaland's spastic burble notwithstanding, he denies any drum'n'bass influence. Funkstorung abusively remixes the Wu-Tang. The Brits hype "abstract hip-hop," but it's vocal-less, down-tempo snoozery. Problem: how do you rap to non-foursquare rhythms?

Enter Ninja Tune and Chocolate Industries. The former is Britain's best provider of breakbeat oddities; the latter is America's newest indie hope, purveyor of electro-hop strongly derivative of Autechre's breakdance-for-aliens crunch. Their mission? Find some hip-hop, and get it remixed by the kids who grew up with old-school rap and electro and have only recently rediscovered it.

Mission accomplished, sort of. They chose East Flatbush Project's "Tried by 12," a mature, stunning single from 1997. The rapper Des deals with the reality of violence, telling how he'd "rather be tried by 12 than carried by six." His flow is good, trailing off and pausing to heighten the effect, but it's his lyrics that stand out: "There goes another statistic running to ballistic." "Beef starts with the shove and ends with the shovel/ and niggaz standing on your corner reminiscing of you." The song ends with a liturgical list of deceased friends. Violence isn't glamorous, but real and grevious. Spenser Bellamy, the producer, reinforces the mood with a sparse beat, a minor-key melody, and some well-placed scratching, with clip-clop horse hooves and guns firing. It should serve as an example of crisp, poignant hip-hop.

A few of the remixers understand the song's emotion and even heighten it. Autechre turn in a stunner, running a ghostly echo of the vocal a split second after the original, a voice from beyond the grave. Then the vocal runs through again, filtered to within an inch of incoherence, a hellish nightmare on the edge of unreality. Ko-Wreck Technique turn in a nice hip-hop remix, with scratched cut-ups of key phrases and a new melody which only adds to the melancholy. Nick Fury detunes the piano and trips over the drumset, so his mix continually grinds closer to a halt, stuttering as it falls. Squarepusher, on the other hand, doesn't worry about preserving meaning. He works Des's rap into hyped-up percussion and invites a rubber-band bassist in for a few freakouts.

But that's where the originality ends. It's surprising how few tricks the remixers have up their sleeves, considering how much talk there is of techno's limitless sonic palette. They filter the vocal and pump the beat so full of crystal meth that any head-nodding potential is severely sabotaged. Not that the mixes are intellectual exercises either. The beats shake around for a few minutes, then grind to a halt, biting Autechre's style without an ounce of its substance.

It's really a shame that Ninja Tune missed this opportunity to explore hip-hop's influences on electronic music. There's no jungle/breakbeat mix, no electro/big beat mix (despite the fact that the Chemical Brothers invite rappers onstage and Prodigy samples Kool Keith), and no real turntable mash-up.

The original plans for this album had DJ Premier as one of the remixers. If only.... Maybe a great hip-hop remix would show techno what a rut it's in. Crunchy breaks, effects, and chopped-up samples can only get you so far. Hip-hop has moved on, as Timbaland, Premier, and Bellamy have shown. It's time for techno to take another lesson from the masters. But it wouldn't hurt if the masters listened to Autechre. (Ninja Tune/Chocolate Industries)

--Sam Frank

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